Library / Professional
Behavioural insights
How people actually decide — defaults, friction, scarcity, and the evidence behind changing behaviour rather than minds.
Why this shelf
Because most educational design assumes people act on what they know, and the gap between knowing and doing is where the work really is.
Book
Influence — Robert B. Cialdini, 1984
Six principles of persuasion, documented from the inside of the industries that use them. Read it defensively first and constructively second.
Book
Nudge — Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein, 2008
The idea that there is no neutral way to present a choice. That single point changed how I think about defaults in an interface.
Book
Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely, 2008
The experiments that make the biases memorable. Some have replicated poorly, which is itself a useful lesson about this literature.
Book
Switch — Chip Heath & Dan Heath, 2010
Its insight is that what looks like resistance is usually a lack of clarity or an obstacle in the path. That reframe has saved me from blaming people more than once.
Book
Scarcity — Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir, 2013
Being short of time or money consumes the cognitive capacity you would need to escape either. The most humane book on this shelf, and the most relevant to teachers.
- EAST: Four Simple Ways to Apply Behavioural InsightsBest door in
Paper
EAST: Four Simple Ways to Apply Behavioural Insights — Behavioural Insights Team, 2014
Easy, attractive, social, timely — the whole field compressed into four words and a short report. The best door in precisely because it is not a book.
Book
Misbehaving — Richard H. Thaler, 2015
The history of how behavioural economics won an argument it was losing. A good study in translating research into practice, which is the other thing I care about.
Book
Inside the Nudge Unit — David Halpern, 2015
What happened when a government actually tried this at scale, including the trials that produced nothing. The null results are the credible part.
Rules
How this shelf is kept
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.
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